Good piece. I'm also extremely sceptical of the “elite overproduction hypothesis” and have been so from the first time I heard about it. I think people underrated how easy it is to construct science-sounding explanatory narratives bolstered by apparent empirical “confirmation” that *seem” explanatory and profound (e..g. Marxism, psychoanalysis, etc) but are so elastic and vague they are confirmed by everything and falsifiable by nothing - one of Popper’s insights.